MONTREAL - Gérald Tremblay owned several franchises of a beauty-products chain specializing in perfume before getting into politics in the 1980s. As the ex-mayor gave his long-awaited testimony before the Charbonneau Commission this week, I kept thinking of that background.

Perfumes are all about producing an illusion: They make something seem more appealing than it really is. And that was the former perfume merchant’s effective role at Montreal city hall: His pleasant, bon-chic-bon-genre personality served to hide a bad smell and make things appear falsely sweet.

Tremblay was still performing that role as he appeared before the commission. Before speaking, he even crossed himself. There he sat, wearing a tasteful suit, Ivy League pinstriped shirt, old-school horn-rimmed glasses — the very picture of a proper grad of the Harvard Business School.

A image-maker’s dream: benign-looking, avuncular, pious. Mr. Upright. The perfect cover, whether he knew it or not, for a crooked system.

That system’s character is now known to all, however, so all Tremblay can do is try to keep the stench from spreading to his own reputation.

“I am just as shocked as you about the revelations (of collusion and corruption),” he told Justice France Charbonneau on Monday. But his most self-exonerating assertion, made in a prepared text, was this: “I affirm that no mayor could have stopped the collusion the way that Marteau (the special police investigative unit) and the commission have been able to do.” That, he said ludicrously, would have required him to act like an investigator and listen to hours of tapped telephone conversations and video recordings.

No, a serious mayor deals with illegal behaviour by acting pre-emptively and discouraging it from happening in the first place.

Tremblay failed spectacularly at such leadership. Far from setting an example for rectitude, he tried only weeks after taking office in 2002 to give a lucrative contract to an organization of which he’d recently been president — blatant cronyism.

Tremblay didn’t even impose a code of ethics on elected officials until he’d been in power for seven years and front-page scandals left him with no choice.

Was Mr. Upright really so unaware as he claims of his cohorts’ lawlessness? Gilles Cloutier, a Roche executive, told the commission on Tuesday that Tremblay personally asked him in 2001 to help out with the city’s coming election. Cloutier was a mastermind of clé-en-main (turnkey) elections, which rely on wantonly illegal corporate funding, and he testified that Tremblay knew it.

Tremblay hasn’t had a chance to respond to this damning charge. So let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and not condemn him for his awareness of Cloutier’s methods.

Rather, let’s judge the extent of Tremblay’s commitment to ethics on the basis of his own words.

In his resignation statement last fall, he tried to show how corruption preceded his tenure by recalling that after the 2001 election he met with the city manager, Guy Coulombe, who “told me there were rumours about brown envelopes circulating in some departments. I asked him what he had done. His response was that he asked for evidence but no one had ever given him any.” That was the end of the story.

A truly upright mayor would have demanded a probe and toughened civil servants’ code of conduct. Tremblay did not.

He told the commission last week that in 2006 he informed the then-police chief, Yvan Delorme, that he’d heard that his party’s fundraiser, Bernard Trépanier, had sought to extort $1 million from a shopping-centre builder; when the chief expressed no interest because no bribe had been paid, Tremblay said he dropped the matter. (Delorme says the mayor mentioned this in an offhand manner.)

An upholder of clean government would have pushed for a probe: Soliciting a bribe (successfully or not) is a crime.

Perhaps the most telling example of Tremblay’s connivance was his response to a Gazette investigation in 2005 (the first of many probes of city hall by Montreal’s news media). The article showed that of the 302 companies whose owners and directors donated (as individuals) to Tremblay’s party during its first four years’ existence, a startling 94 per cent received city contracts.

A diligent mayor would have expressed concern about this correlation between money and influence. Tremblay blasted reporter Linda Gyulai’s account as “demagogic” and “intellectually dishonest.” He even complained (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) to the Quebec Press Council about the story’s accuracy.

That was the day I lost confidence in the mayor’s integrity. His aggressive indignation was smoking-gun evidence he was a protector of the system.

Is Tremblay telling the truth when he insists he did what he could to rein in the unethical conduct that swirled around city hall?

Let me answer it this way. This is the same mayor who betrayed his 2001 campaign promise not to stand in the way of demerger referendums. That was no run-of-the-mill campaign promise: It, together with Cloutier’s illegal assistance, helped get him elected. Tremblay thus owes his mayoralty to early cynicism and dishonesty.

The former perfume merchant was able to temporarily hide the putrid character of his administration. It will take authentic moral leadership to get Montreal out of this mess.

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